Concocted by four editors of something called Equator magazine (I am told it is a large glossy tabloid of odd people doing odd things), Hot Type‘s subtitle is: “Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction.” On the basis of the writing selected, I don’t know if I would let some of “our most celebrated writers” into the house without locking up the silver and providing a chastity belt for the cat.
Maybe, at one time, such an anthology—though not assisted by so many cooks—might have been a good idea. It would be interesting to see whom, for instance, James Joyce or Marcel Proust would have championed, or whom Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Hemingway would have seen fit to hype and blurb. But not any more. All that is nowadays required to become an outstanding author is to come up with one well-pushed, well-hyped book and jump right into the pantheon with’ Susan Minot, Bob Shacochis, and Mona Simpson. It is fitting that the writers these three outstanding authors pick are as derivative and reeking of the trendy masters as themselves.
Three other outstanding authors—Cynthia Ozick, Joy Williams, and William Kennedy—do a slightly better job of picking but, to adapt Francis Stuart’s evaluation of Frank O’Connor, these are “the knitters at the soft center of American writing.” I, you, they—Rebecca Stone, Stephen Cooper, and Douglas Bauer—have all read these stories elsewhere and will keep reading them again and again.
Then there is Richard Ford, that outstanding American author of The Sportswriter who writes in the foreword to the anthology: “When I started to think of what to write here, I decided a list would help, a short menu of desideratums: must-do’s without which the whole, old machine of writing will never be truly new or well—ignoring entirely the Great Books, the famous tricks of the trade, and of course talent.”
I think it’s safe to imagine the sort of writing Ford is interested in: “Art’s spirit is serious in nature if not in demeanor, and at heart it is unselfish. If it could, it would always be a help. And here in the stories that follow and in the words said about them, its own needs are met, its requirements for survival generously, faithfully served.”
The great American editor and outstanding writer Cordon Lish picked Lynn Grossman, of whom he has said:
I can tell you all about Lynn Grossman. I have never had a drink with her, or a coffee with her or shared even as little (as much?) as a subway ride with her, but I am still willing to keep my shoulder to the assertion that I know all about Lynn Grossman. But you must not think that I think that it is because she has been, and still is, a student of mine that I think I know all about Lynn Grossman. You see, I am not that kind of teacher and Lynn Grossman is not that kind of student—meaning that for each of us the object is the story and not the person. Yet I am still offering you my claim to complete knowledge of Lynn Grossman. Indeed the reason I am so insistent as to the necessity of my claim is this—to wit, there is for me no way to pay a higher compliment to the force of a story. I mean that when a story does its work, there issues from it the exact mark of its maker. I mean that when Lynn Grossman made “The Sleeves” the force of it is, she disclosed her heart for the indelibility it is. I mean that I am glad to receive that heart—and to have the teacher’s honor of passing it along to you.
Her story begins, “This all starts when my Wednesday cuts me back half-day from full day.” It does not get any better.
It is sad to see Michael Stephens in this sea of “prose.” Stephens is hardly a kid and wrote one of the best depictions of Irish-American life, Season at Coole. Nothing he has written since has been up to the high standard he set for himself then, though his play, Our Father, comes close. He has tried to twist himself away from his own experience, but this doesn’t work, nor is he helped any by being introduced by Russell Banks, who is off frying other fish when he should be attending to what exactly it is that Michael Stephens is all about.
The best story in the book is by Pinckney Benedict and is introduced by Joyce Carol Oates, whose Ontario Review Press published his collection Town Smokes. Benedict is a writer of risk and courage. Witness the opening of his story: “Loftus and Bone headed over to the Bowl*O*Drome to take in the women’s leagues and see if they could get Loftus’s mind off of Arnette. Arnette was the redheaded woman that had run off with some college puke a couple days before and had broken Loftus’s heart and shattered his life.” The risk comes in laying out so much so clearly so early on, and then having the courage to balance it on an impoverished, debased language without the reader condescending; that is a remarkable achievement. Aware of all the traps that are awaiting Benedict, I hope he will fly them and trust his vision, so evident in this story and his collection. I am not optimistic, but I like the story’s concluding lines: “And he was happy in the saying of it and proud to live in that fashion, even though he knew that for his suffering she would never leave him for another man again.”
Do yourself a favor: bypass Hot Type and read Stephens’ Season at Coole and Benedict’s Town Smokes.
[Hot Type, edited by John Miller, Heidi Benson, Cynthia Koral, and Randall Koral (New York: Collier Books) 235 pp., $7.95]
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